The violence and tumult that have plagued postwar Iraq are understandable given the country's long history of totalitarian rule, Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Monday during a visit to Dallas.

Mr. Klaus, whose country is one of the few to have sent troops to Iraq, said his country appreciates the difficult transition from "a totalitarian regime to a pluralistic and market society." The Czech Republic is a former communist state that shook free of Soviet influence in 1989.

"My experience is that democracy is not an imported good," he said during a visit with The Dallas Morning News editorial board. "To expect that a country would just swallow such solutions from the outside is not the experience of my country."

Mr. Klaus, a former prime minister of the Czech Republic, was in Dallas to accept the National Center for Policy Analysis' Distinguished Leader Award. He spoke as part of the center's Distinguished Lecture Series on Monday night at the Wyndham Anatole Hotel.

The president is an economist who studied in the United States in the 1960s as a graduate student. He is credited with introducing reforms that brought his country, then Czechoslovakia, from socialism to a market economy.

The Czech president is among the European leaders who do not believe in complete integration with the European Union. Although Czech voters endorsed membership in the European Union in June, Mr. Klaus was not a strong advocate of it.

"I am not one who thinks that the optimum point of unification is the final point," he said. "Total unification - the creation of a single European state - I would like to stop somewhere."

The president said the country had already liberalized its economy and opened its markets and is skeptical about the usefulness of union with Europe.

"For the normal people there will be no change," he said, "because trade is fully liberalized. Financial flows are fully liberalized."

In addition to the Czech Republic's troops in Iraq, Czechs are also working at a military hospital in Basra in southern Iraq, he said.

Mr. Klaus said he believes other European countries would consider participating in the Iraq effort.

"They are just looking for a way to do it," he said. "Hopefully the offer of the U.S. president will be such that it will be acceptable for them."

E-mail dmichaels@dallasnews.com Copyright 2003 The Dallas Morning News